Yodelbank
From Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia
Yodel Bank was an online anonymous banking system which ended operations during November of 2005. Yodel Bank was not a registered company in any country, its operator's identity is unknown, and it existed entirely outside any countries' laws.
Contents |
[edit] Operations
Yodel Banks operations functioned on top of various forms of electronic money including the Digital Monetary Trust, e-gold, Pecunix, 1MDC, FreeTraders, and the e-Liberty Dollar. Yodel Bank had no physical-world presence, instead existing entirely inside the "cipherspace." The interface towards Yodel Bank was originally put inside IIP (an encrypted and pseudonymous IRC network). After Invisiblenet shut down due to hardware failure, the IRC interface moved to the Metropipe IRC network. There was also a Web interface to Yodel Bank at one point.
A client would transfer money by having the bank issue a certificate[1] worth a certain amount, whereupon the bank would also deduct that amount from the payer's account. A certificate consisted of information about the payment, including the amount and currency, but not the originator's account. For authenticity, a certificate would also include a digital signature by the bank. To complete a transaction, the payer, upon obtaining a certificate, would transmit the certificate by some means (email, instant messaging, etc.) to the payee, who would then deposit it into their account through one of Yodel Bank's interfaces.
Because Yodel Bank functioned on top of DMT, and the only ways to communicate with Yodel Bank were secure and/or anonymous, it was an entirely anonymous internet bank, if the definition thereof does not include untraceability. Yodel bank did not use blind signatures (the mechanism behind untraceable anonymous money) making it possible for the bank to track transactions between its clients. However, since accounts could be well-disconnected from a user's real-world identity, this was usually not a concern.
[edit] Curious features and closing
Yodel Bank was not a registered company in any country, and its operator's identity is unknown. The bank existed entirely outside any countries' laws. Instead of following laws, it claimed to follow the Common Economic Protocols,[2] a set of economic principles based on libertarian theory. It is unknown how many users it had, and how much money was stored in the system at a typical time. It is likely it did not become very popular because it never supported automatic transfers in and out of the payment systems upon which it was built (e.g. DMT, E-gold); rather, users would have to manually arrange such transfers with the bank operator.
Yodel Bank ceased operation in November of 2005 because the bank's operator had "decided to put his time into more viable projects."
